People Actually Like CostCo???

For years people have been saying "you guys need to get a CostCo membership." I'd always responded, I don't have room in my house for five-gallon vats of mayonnaise." The usual response to that is, "oh, they have more than just super-sized stuff."

At any rate, this week, there was a Groupon deal for CostCo memberships. So, I pulled the trigger. Got the email saying "here's your membership number, come down to the service desk at your local CostCo to activate your membership." Forwarded that email to my wife so she could do it as part of her errands (since her Wednesday errands take her right past a CostCo).

She goes to CostCo, today, intent on registering/confirming/activating the membership per the emailed instructions. She's told, "your husband will need to either come down to do it or go online and add you as an authorized user."

My wife and I share a last name (her decision, not mine) and, obviously, an address. While I understand CostCo is trying to cut down on account-sharing, denying the ability of someone with the same last name and address (printed on a government ID — a RealID one, no less) to activate the account is beyond stupid.

She gets home and sends me the URL for logging in. I go to the web-site and attempt to login. It asks for my email address and a password I was never forwarded. So, I hit the "forgot my password" link. I enter in the email address I registered with expecting a confirmation link or code to shortly arrive. 

Several minutes pass with no confirmation link or code. So, I figure, "Ok, maybe I need to create an account, first". I then try to use the account registration-tool. Enter my email address. An email address with a confirmation code shows up in under 5s. Take that code and enter it into the online registration form. Am greeted with an error message and instructions to call customer support so I can give them the code.

The "contact support" text-string is a clickable link. "Cool," I think. I click the link. It takes me to a page of phone numbers to call. None really seem to match why I'm wanting to call, so I pick one that looks most likely to get me where I need to be.

Call goes through and a robot picks up. I work through the IVR system until I realize, "this fucking thing is just a loop," after I've gone several iterations of hitting "3" then "4" and hearing the same number-punching guidance.

Livid, I return to the page to see if there's any kind of email address or chat tool I can use.

There's a chat tool. I click on it. Window pops up saying that I'm talking to a virtual assistant (fucking wonderful). It offers a screenful of options. At the bottom of those is a line saying "type 'agent' if you'd like to speak with a customer service representative" (nevermind that I clicked the chat-link to chat with a human, not a fucking robot).

I dutifully type in "agent". It then asks me what I'm wanting to talk with an agent about (DAMMIT). I hit enter without selecting a reason, but it continues the chat-routing. It prompts me for the email address I signed up for the membership with and the membership number that was sent via email.

Eventually, I get a human in the chat. She asks me for my email address and membership number (why the fuck was I prompted for those if the human was going to need to ask for them again???). I type the requested information at her. I explain the situation, finishing up with the mention of the error message. She asks for that message and error code. I give it to her. She tells me she has to talk to one of her support people and that it would be a few minutes.

A few minutes pass. She says she needs my phone number so she can call me and then patch me through to her support rep. I give her the number.

My phone rings. I hear a voice on the other end asking "is this Mr. Jones". I respond in the affirmative. She then says to please wait while she does a warm handoff to her support representative.

Eventually, the support representative gets on the line. Again, we go through the gory details. The support representative then asks if she can text me a one-time code as a verification. I verify the number she wants to send to. She indicates she sent it. Nothing arrives. After a few more minutes, a text message continues to fail to arrive.

She asks me if I have another textable phone number. I say that I do but it's not a number that I like to use. She indicates that it's just for a one-time text and that it won't be saved to my account. I give her my phone's actual SIM phone number. She says she just tried to send a text but that her system said it wasn't a valid number. I respond, "I use Google Fi for my SIM: they re-sell T-Mobile and maybe your system doesn't like that." She responds with the question, "do you have a land-line I can call?" I tell her, "it's 2026, so, 'no'."

She then says that she's going to have to further escalate my case and asks if the number that she's talking to me through can be used. I affirm that it is. She tells me it will be 1-2 business days before there's follow-up from the escallation.

So, yeah, I'm not best pleased with CostCo, right now.

Ruminations On Modern Cars

I am a fairly picky person when it comes to acquiring cars for personal use. I prefer manual transmissions. I prefer that vehicles handle nimbly. I prefer that they stop on a dime. I prefer that they corner like they're on rails. I prefer that they can accelerate their way out of potential accidents. I prefer smaller cars. I prefer cars that aren't on the HOA-friendly spectrum of greys, silvers, whites, blacks and tans.

Prior to this month, my last two purchases were both custom-ordered cars

• My car — a 2002 BMW 330Ci convertible — had to be custom-ordered because I wanted features that just weren't available on dealers lots. Specifically, I wanted a convertible (as I'd fallen in love with having one due to my prior roadster) and I wanted a car that handled nimbly for its size and weight. Since I was custom-ordering, I took the opportunity to buy a color that wasn't normally available in the North American market, "techno violet metallic":
  
  
  
  
  
• My wife's car — a 2012 Mini Countryman S — also had to be factory-ordered. At the time, there were damned few on the lot with manual transmissions, and of the ones that were, they were all HOA-friendly colors. Wife was never going to accept one of those colors, not when it would have to sit in our driveway next to my metallic-violet convertible. So, we ordered one in Chili Red:
  
  

  

  Pretty spiffy, even at almost 13yo

  
  

For better or worse, my wife's nearly 13yo car had decided to become too expensive to justify its ongoing maintenance costs. In the past 18 months, it had had two failures that resulted in the need to be towed and one that required significant garage-time and repair expensive. Basically, in the last 18 months, a car with a $4000 blue-book value had cost north of $12000 in repairs, only one of which were "natural wear and tear" in nature (and ignoring tire-replacements due to road hazards).

This set us on the path of looking at new cars. While we both significantly prefer manual transmissions over automatics, vehicles with manual transmissions have become very rare on dealers' lots and even in manufacturer's lineups. We both also prefer smaller cars. We'd agreed, a few years earlier, that if we were giving up stickshifts, it would only be for EVs. So, we started by looking at EVs that weren't ginormous and weren't ridiculously-priced. We ended up trying out:

• BMW i4: while, at $65K, normally more expensive than we'd like, the local BMW dealer was trying to clear the 2025s off their lot to get ready for the arrival of the 2026es. They'd adjusted their pre-haggling price to lower-middle $50Ks
• Hyundai Ioniq 5: at nearly $60K (before dealer incentives), it was at the edge of our price-range
• Volkswagen ID4: at a shade over $55K (before dealer incentives) it was still within the top third of our desired price-range
• Ford Mustang Mach-E: priced similarly to the ID4,  it was still within the top third of our desired price-range
• Volvo EX30: priced in the mid $40Ks (before dealer incentives), it was about $8K more than our Mini was when new but $15K less than when my BMW was new 

The BMW:

While I am beyond happy with my current BMW, I'd heard rumblings both about build-quality and handling.

• My wife's Mini — a BMW group product — has had a litany of build-quality issues: it lost its first clutch at less than 35,000 miles (fortunately, within the warranty period) and, particularly lately (see above) has been suffering a spate of "we don't usually see those kinds of failures" durability issues.
• I also have friends and acquaintances who have or have had BMWs made since 2010: my wife's Mini isn't the only BMW group product with quality issues
• When we were last looking for a car — what ultimately became our Mini — I'd stopped in at the dealership to check out the X1. The salesguy asked what else we were looking at. I'd told him we'd liked the Mini and he turned up his nose and said something about their ride being "too harsh". When a BMW salesman tells you that another marque's ride is "too harsh", you know that BMW has lost the plot. That one statement caused me to cut our interaction short and to tell the salesman, "if you think the Mini's ride is too harsh, I know that I'll hate everything you have on offer here".

In spite of the above, we went to look at the i4: the price-cut was too much to ignore. First bit of weirdness is that you had to schedule a test-drive ("uh... Ok. I guess you guys don't want impulse buyers, eh?"). So, we scheduled one. Next bit of weirdness is that, even though the dealership was located a quarter mile from the ramp to a 4-lane interstate, I wasn't allowed to take the car onto the highway. They also didn't have any areas for testing out the vehicle's handling/nimbleness. Other bit of weirdness was that the sales guy had to come with us. My wife is a nervous driver — barely able to tolerate my presence when she's at the wheel — so the salesman insisting on being in the car meant there was no way in hell that she was going to take the wheel. Last bit didn't really matter as I'd already noped on the car before she would have had her chance to drive. While the i4 has decent acceleration and is smooth in the straights, it is an ABSOLUTE PIG in turns. Further, when I'd pressed the salesman on finding a spot to test its handling, he acquiesced and directed me to a (very small) parking lot. I tried doing some slalums in the short length of the parking lot. The i4's handling in that lot made me want to vomit. 

We took the car back to the dealership. The salesguy enthusiastically asked, "you interested in buying," and I responded that I found the i4's drive-quality to be extremely disappointing. I said something along the lines of "it's pretty clear that BMW has long since shed their 'driving machine' ethos". He asked if I'd be willing to talk to the sales manager. I agreed, mostly so I could better convey "you guys have seriously lost your way: this is a garbage car". The salesmanager seemed incredulous.  

The Mustang Mach-E:

There's a Ford dealership walking distance to our house. This was actually the very last EV that we tried: driving past the Ford dealership on our daily trips to the gym (and back), I'd stopped noticing Mach-Es on their lot in recent months. I'd assumed they were no longer ordering them due to Trump's fuckery. Turns out, they still had them on the lot, just not immediately visible from the road and no longer in other than HOA-friendly colors.

Before heading over, I chatted at a friend who'd bought a Mach-E a few model-years earlier. He's a small-car guy, too (even though he'd had an early 2000s BMW M5 for a while). So, he warned me that, while he had been quite happy with his — enough so that he would buy another one if it made sense to do so — he did note that it was a bit large. 

At any rate, we drove over. After parking my car (Mini was still in the shop), we started walking to the showroom. An overly-eager salesguy accosted us and asked us what we were looking for. Said we wanted to give the Mach-E a try. Took nearly twenty minutes to fetch one up. Went out to the car and, as with the BMW dealership, the salesguy wanted to ride-along (bah!). Worse, since "our" salesguy was very new, one of the more-senior salesguys wanted to come along, as well. Whatevs.

The door design on the Mach-E is beyond stupid: not only does it not have traditional door-handles, it doesn't even have the recessed ones that so many EVs have. Instead, you had to electronically release the door latch, then use a little flipper on the door to pull it open. Frankly, the door-flipper thing looked like utter ass — like it was glued on at the last minute. Wife insta-noped just because of how you get into the car. I felt committed to the test-drive, so I got the mirrors situated and started my run. The Mach-E was AWD, so I was more than a bit surprised that I was able to break the tires loose exiting the dealer's lot (not good). While it had nice acceleration and a non-wallowy drive, it felt extremely heavy. It also provided zero feedback through either the driver's seat or the steering-wheel. Driving down a residential street, I felt like I had zero idea of where the Mach-E's corners were. Finally understood why so many people like to straddle the centerlines of the streets in our neighborhood.

Got it back to the dealership and conveyed my misgivings. Sales manager asked what it would take to change my mind. Told him I would need a "can't refuse this deal" kind of low-price for me to even consider it. He assured me that he could get me that. What they came back with was more expensive than everything except the BMW i4 and the Hyundai Ioniq 5. So, uh, "nope".

They phoned me a couple days later. I said, "at that price, it's not even price-competitive with the cars I actually liked.

The Hyundai Ioniq 5:

I'd been looking forward to driving this one. It had very good reviews, was a nice size and had the features we were looking for. My neighbor had recently bought a Hyundai ICE-base car. He was pleased with the dealership. So, we drove down to that dealership for a try-out.

We'd first tried to get a test-drive while we were up in Pennsylvania at my mom's house. However, contrary to what Hyundai's web-site was showing for "in stock" availability, the dealership up there had none (well, they had one but it was broken). The web-site said they had nearly two dozen. So, it had been snake-eyes on that one.

Similarly, before driving out to the dealership where my Neighbor got his Elantra(?), the web-site was showing that they had nearly three dozen, two of which were Ioniq 5Ns (woot!). Got there and discovered that not only did they have zero 5Ns, they only had a handful of regular 5s at various trim-levels. Gave the salesguy my license and insurance information and he got us a key and took us out to the vehicle. He gave us a quick orientation, then headed back inside (yay! No stranger-danger passengers!). We took it out for a spin. It handled (considerably) better than either the i4 or the Mach-E. Quite-respectable acceleration. Flat and even in the turns. Was a little squishier while slaloming than I'd have preferred, but not intolerably so: I feel like the 5N would have been more to my handling preferences. Interior was very nicely laid out, especially the instrumentation. Got back to the dealership and talked price. It was upper-end of the $50-60K range. While I would probably have been ok dropping $70K on the 5N, dropping $60 on even a higher-trim (regular) 5 felt "iffy". Probably didn't help that it was $7K more expensive than the equivalent ID4, but didn't feel like a $7K greater value.

The Volkswagen ID4:

This was a pretty good peer-offering to the Ioniq 5. Good size. Marginally-better handling. Slightly inferior display layout. Better price than the Ioniq 5 — a price that felt better value-aligned than the Ioniq 5's price. Also like the Ioniq 5, it was a bit bigger than the Mini than I'd have liked, but the size came with additional range. I believe we'd have been quite satisfied with it. Other than the better price, this would have been a coin-flip compared to an equivalently-appointed Ioniq 5. At the time, its acquisition-options were a bit more attractive than the Ioniq's: while they wanted you to lease it, it also had a zero-down, 72month 0% purchase option. I wouldn't have had to touch any of my brokerage accounts and there'd have been no pressure to speed-pay it (to save on interest costs).

Only "concern" was (like with the Ioniq) lack of color options. My wife would have been whining at me for ages about doing something about the blandness (presumably resulting in spending a few $1000s to get it skinned).

The Volvo EX30:

This was the one we ended up buying:

 

While I'm not a fan of its having taken interior design-cues from the Tesla 3 — I prefer an instrument-display that's behind the steering wheel, not the solitary, iPad-esque centrally-located display — the display-setup was at least serviceable. Overall, the interior's design is very minimalistic. From the exterior, you wouldn't be able to tell it was an EV but for its lack of a grill.

When I was trying to make my buying decision, I was looking up reviews on Car & Driver for it (and, the ID4 and the Ioniq 5). It was top-rated in its segment. I was amused to see one of the cons as having a harsh/stiff ride. To me, it's the right kind of ride: it provides plenty of feedback to the driver by way of the seat and the steering wheel: you feel very connected to the road. You also feel very connected to the car, itself — easily being able to "feel" where the corners of the car are, how much grip your tires have, etc.. It drives nice and level and stays flat in the turns.

It's a very glassy design, so, you have excellent visibility of the traffic around you. So, while there's lots of sensors to help you out with knowing where traffic and other obstacles are, you don't really need those aids (frankly, the Mach-E would have been dangerous to drive without its sensors).

Ours has the dual-electric motors powering its AWD. It has 440 brake horsepower that the AWD puts a significant percentage of straight into the ground. Unlike the AWD Mach-E, I wasn't able to casually break the tires' grip.

The car really wants to go fast, though. I mean, on the drive back from picking the car up, I went to merge onto the outer-loop of the beltway. I stomped on the throttle, and it accelerated smoothly. It, perhaps, accelerates too smoothly: I looked down and was over 100MPH and at no time did it feel like it struggled to get there nor did is suffer any buffeting or other instability. Really, it feels a lot like driving my BMW …just that it's even quicker to blow through the 100MPH mark.

Had to Get a New Car

My wife's (now "prior") car, a 2012 Mini Countryman, was just a couple months away from being thirteen years old. We'd ordered it in October of 2012. Local dealerships have, since at least 2010, kept very minimal selections of cars with manual-transmissions on their lots. Local dealerships have, since at least the late 90s, have also mostly kept "HOA-friendly" car colors (greys, silvers, blacks, whites and tans) on their lots. Between wanting a manual transmission and wanting an actual color, we had to order that car rather than being able to drive it away the same day we went to see what they had. On the plus side, they did have one car with a manual transmission, so we weren't buying wholly blind. At any rate, we'd ordered a "chili" red Countryman that finally arrived Thanksgiving week of 2012. We were out of area for the holidays, so we couldn't pick it up until the 28th.

Last year, it started to become expensive to maintain:

• A/C had become anemic in 2023 — unable to keep up with the DC summer heat when we took a road-trip to Hampton, VA  — and had all but quit by spring of 2024. So, we had to get a refrigerant recharge that May. Cost to get the recharge: nearly $1,000 
• We experienced a timing-chain failure a couple months later. Cost to repair: a shade over $6,500
• During an unusually warm period, late that autumn, we noticed that the A/C was again no longer functioning. We'd assumed that there was an age-related leak in the A/C lines and that the refrigerant we'd gotten that spring had leaked out. When we finally opted to get it fixed, this past spring, the cause had been discovered to be that during one of our trips to my mom's house, a stone had gotten up into the engine compartment and punctured the compressor. Cost to repair: a bit over $2,000
• Earlier this summer, as I was pulling out of our driveway to go to the gym, I heard a loud bang. I quickly pulled over to investigate and found a piece of metal in the road in front of our driveway at pretty much the exact location the "bang" had come from. Got the car back up in the driveway to investigate and found that the right-rear spring had broken. Cost to repair: another $2,000+

At that point, I was in the "I don't know that I can justify throwing this kind of money at a nearly 13yo car" state of mine. A couple weeks ago, as we were leaving the grocery store, the shift-selector stopped working. I thought, "great: another four- to five-figure repair bill," and decided, "I'm gonna start looking for replacement options while I wait for the estimate." Ultimately, the failure wasn't as drastic as I'd feared — the linkage-cable that connected the gear-selector's R, 1 and 2 to the gearbox had snapped. "Only" $1,500 to repair.

However, by that point, I was well into my new car shopping. When I'd started visiting dealerships, I'd figured "no trade-in" since, at nearly 13yo, I'd assumed that the repair cost was going to be higher than the trade-in value. Once I had the repair estimate, I called all the dealerships (whose cars I'd liked) back to ask about a likely trade-in value. I'd checked Edmunds for an expected value based on the condition of the Mini and it being driveable. All of the dealerships came in at the high end of what Edmunds said I should reasonably expect. So, I authorized the repair.

When I'd first gotten the repair estimate for the timing-chain, I'd had the shop hold off on the repair while I applied for and received a credit card with a 0% introductory APR and a generous credit limit. I'd put that and all subsequent repairs on that card and started paying it off. Given that Edmunds was telling me that it should be worth paying off and, even if the dealerships got fucky, I'd at least have the Mini back in driveable condition, I pulled the trigger. 

There was no fuckery, so we ended up buying a new car. Of all the cars we looked at, we ended up with a 2025 Volvo EX30:

 

It was just too fun to drive to say "no" to. I've never had a Volvo before. Never would have looked at a Volvo because, in my mind, they were staid, boxy cars for old people overly concerned about vehicle safety. Which is to, cars that had no focus on being fun to drive. With 440 brake horesepower, a 0-60 time of 3.4s, stiff suspension that makes for great cornering, this one was the most fun to drive of all the EVs we tried out. It was also the smallest we could find — being the same height and width as our Mini and only 6" longer.

Fuck Twitter (Pt. 2)

 Previously, I said, "fuck Twitter". Today, I found that I'd been temp-banned, again. Apparently, saying that someone should face the long-established legal repercussions of treasonous acts:

Is somehow in violation of Twitter's policies. Apparently, the above violates the policy of "You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so." I don't see it. I'm simply stating that Trump should face established legal consequences of his actions if those actions can be proven.

Fun fact: when you request an appeal, they offer you the option to explain why your penalty should be overturned. However, they limit your explanatory text to not even half as many characters as one is afforded for a tweet. Seems pretty obvious that both Twitter's sanction and appeal processes are a sham.

I guess that, after this (7-day) ban ends, I am going to export my posting-history and delete my account.

It's Technological Annoyances Day

Every month, I archive my personal and work emails to a separate gMail account. It helps keep my actively-monitored mailboxes manageable and provides me a good backup of old mails, "just in case". Normally, I just go into my IMAP mail-client (Thunderbird), do a search for all of the prior month's emails, select all the returns, then use my mail client's message-move feature to kick off the archival process. Normally, it's fire and forget and, depending how much mail I've sent or received in a month, it takes a few minutes to as much as an hour. Today, however, Google keeps timing out on the transfers, as though they've implemented some kind of throttling. WTF, guys. I paid for the extra storage, stop fucking messing with me.

Fuck Twitter

 So, this morning, I log in at 0600 to start my work day. As I'm waiting for the tunnels to my work-environment to set up, I hop on Twitter real quick to see if there were any overnight notifications waiting. Instead, I find:

 So, I follow the on-screen prompts to see what the fuck was the reason, this time. I find that someone had apparently reported me for the post:

I was, to say the least, incredulous. My response was to the post:

When I discovered my issue at 0600-ish, it said I had a bit over six hours left on a 12 hour ban. It asked if I wanted to appeal the temp-ban. So, I clicked on the links to do so. A little while later, I get an email saying "nope: the ban stands". It arrived ridiculously fast. Like, so fast that I have sincere doubts that such "appeals" are actually handled by humans, or, if they are even glanced at by humans, it's only in the most-cursory manner possible (likely some paid-by-the-article-reviewed wage-slave that doesn't actually bother to read the appealed-content).

I mean, the Trumps collectively post far worse on a daily basis. So to do their followers. Even after the ban of DJT and others in his hateful, pin-headed cabal, his followers continue to re-share his horrendous shit as images taken from postings on other sites.

Hell, it took DJT fanning the flames of an insurrection to get perma-banned and had taken significantly more than a joking-fantasy post to get his posts labeled with a moderation-notice (though, interestingly not actually banned).

However, if I make an obvious joke, I get hit with the (temp) ban-hammer? I mean, seriously: when am I going to have the "opportunity" to interact with any Trump, let alone this, specific shit-weasel. Even if I did get a chance to make such an offer, how likely is it that said shit-weasel would accept it – yes, I know the fucktard in question has demonstrably-poor taste in food, but even he's gotta have high enough mental-functionality to turn down a meal at a shady restaurant even if he were otherwise predisposed to accept an offer.

So, again, how is this ban-worthy at all let alone compared to the things they've posted. My post was significantly tamer than other shit, even if one is so clue-impaired as to not see the obvious joke. I get that my miniscule number of followers means I get no special consideration, but still… combined with their years of failure to meaningfully moderate, it really makes one wonder what the fuck kind of sliding-scale it is they're using.

At any rate, with the temp-ban in place and the clock counting down, I was able to at least read posts. However, given that my VPN-tunnels had finally completed their setup and I had a busy work day to attend to, I flipped away to my work virtual-desktop and attended to my work.

I finished up my work-day a bit after 1500. Went to check on my ban-status, fully expecting that, since I'd worked for 9+ hours, the ban would be over. Instead I found my Twitter tab had refreshed itself to:

And I was no longer even able to read posts. Clicking on the Start button, instead of getting me back to the reader, simply bounced me back to the above status page with a slightly decremented counter.

Also, it appears that having filed an appeal at 0600ish caused my temp-ban's timer to be reset.

So, again, "Fuck. Twitter."

You Call This Managing a Project?

 You're in charge of a decent-sized, multi-year project. You've been using a hosted ticketing- and documentation-service to manage the work and documentation for that work. Eighteen months ago, you received notice that the hoster is discontinuing their offering and that you need to be off their service by 2022-08-01 (when it goes into a read-only mode for thirty days before finally being offlined). Do you immediately start planning your move …or do you wait till July of 2022 to start trying to move everyone off?

I think you know where I'm going with this, but, "wait: there's more!"

Middle of last week, project's management-team sent out a request asking us to test their IP whitelisting solution. They had selected a new hosted ticketing- and documentation-system. However for security reasons, they didn't want it to be attackable from random people on the internet. Therefore, to access their new, hosted service, they needed to whitelist everybody. Obviously, whitelisting a primarily-remote workforce of several dozen people would be an unwieldy IP-list to maintain – especially when someone's IP changed due to, say, a power outage. So, they decided to whitelist the IP address of a bastion-host we'd set up for SSH-based tunneling into their networks. However, they didn't understand that our already whitelisted host was strictly for SSH tunneling and not a full-fledged VPN solution. They'd been told that in 2019 but never really bothered to understand the difference. This meant that they didn't understand why it wasn't really meant to be an HTTP proxy. Yes, we tunnel HTTP through it, but the whitelisted host is the first passthrough-hop in a multi-hop tunnel. The proxied HTTP content was all hosted in network-space that was topologically part of the same network-space that the egress-node of the multi-hop SSH-tunnel was in. Setting up the first-hop tunnel-host as a direct HTTP proxy would mean needing to set up a tunneled-proxy on that first-hop host …and a corresponding new browser session so it could be configured to use that new proxy-endpoint. All for for one URL.

Yesterday, they got one of the networks we tunnel to whitelisted. However, only sometimes does the login URL respond before timing out. And, when it does, the login service doesn't reliably recognize our 2FA tokens (and thus far, when I've actually been able to connect, has never recognized my token).

I reported these problems as I encountered them, but their response has been utter nonchalance, even when I reminded them "your current ticketing system dies at 0000 Monday".

Buuuut I'm Already Paying for the Streams??

 Recently, my Google Tiles have brought me a few different articles about how NetFlix is experimenting with shutting down different-household account sharing. This is the article that my tiles brought me, today.

Now, I can understand that there are people that are using NetFlix (et. al.) in a way that is providing more usage than is being paid for. That said, if your streaming plan allows for N numbers of concurrent streams, whether four individuals are using that capacity under one roof or not should be immaterial. Similarly, whether or not those four streams are being used, part-time, across four people or thirty should also be immaterial. The plans offered aren't "four concurrent streams for an aggregate of 48 streaming-hours per month", it's a max of four concurrent streams, full stop. Arguing otherwise harkens back to cellular companies and (post-consolidation/big) ISPs putting their ginormous asterisks on their "unlimited" plans.

Further, What Netflix needs to understand is, if they're selling accounts that allow for "N" concurrent streams, they aren't losing money if, as the account-owner, I retain a stream for myself and set up profiles for N-1 other users – whether under my roof or no. NetFlix offers plan tiers (per the article, $9/mo for single-concurrency; $14/mo for dual-concurrency; $18/mo for quad-concurrency). In the case of my NetFlix account, I popped for the $18/mo. plan. That allows my wife and I to be in different rooms watching two different NetFlix-hosted shows or movies. It also means I have two paid for streams left over. 

My mom's retired and every dollar counts. So, since I have the two, paid for extra streams, I set up her Roku with my login. She doesn't watch much NetFlix. Indeed, if she didn't have the use of one of my paid for, extra streams, she'd not purchase a NetFlix subscription at all.

Me? I tend to be a binge-and-suspend streamer. Which is to say: I sign up for a given streaming-service when I know they've posted a series (or several) that I want to watch; I binge the series (or a few series); I suspend or cancel my account. Why would I pay for a year of any given streaming service when I can buy just one month. Especially, why would I pay four a half-dozen streaming services for a year when each such service might only have a few weeks worth of content I'm actually interested in?

There's currently only two streaming services that I don't binge-and-suspend: NetFlix and Prime Video:

• The only reason I don't binge-and-suspend Prime Video is because it's free with my Prime account. If I had to pay for it as a standalone service ...I probably wouldn't even binge-and-suspend as their content is almost entirely garbage. The notable exceptions being their acquisition of The Expanse after SyFy canceled it plus both the Jack Ryan series and The Boys. While Amazon has had some decent original content (Borat 2 was ok, as was Coming 2 America), it's rarely been content I'd sign up for a month's worth of service for or rent via Vudu (et. al).
• I don't binge-and-suspend NetFlix almost exclusively because I'm sharing it. Basically, I don't want my mom going to actually try to watch NetFlix only to be rebuffed. Absent that share-with-my-mom anchor, NetFlix would definitely be on the binge-and-suspend list.

At any rate, doing the math – and ignoring (for now) binge-and-suspend habits – what does NetFlix stand to make by making sharing outside of a household no longer doable? Absolute best case, I roll back to a two-stream plan and my mom ponies up for a one-stream plan. If both households leave their accounts in place, month in and month out, that $18/mo becomes $23/mo for them (. This is probably what their bean-counters are selling to their executives. But, what it ignores is:

• The risk that the shared-with household won't sign up at all
• The risk that the shared-from household won't retain at least the break-even number of streams
• The risk that the shared-from household won't switch to binge-and-suspend
• The risk that the shared-from household will simply wholly discontinue service due to the annoyance of having terms changed.

The funny thing is, Netflix's primary streaming-base is younger viewers. Which is to say, viewers who are far more likely to move to binge-and-suspend usage patterns. While the risks around boomers wholly turning off or moving to binge-and-suspend consumption-style is low, boomers aren't the primary customer-demographic.

I get that there is probably a non-trivial amount of actual abuse, but you could cut down on some of it by limiting the number of viewer-profiles ...and then using ML to evaluate whether any of the configured profiles are obviously being shared far-and-wide. But, overall, it comes across like NetFlix (and supposedly others) trying to hold on to a fistful of sand by squeezing tighter. There's too many ways to circumvent controls. Right now, circumvention is minimal. But, if the early 2000s demonstrated anything, it's that circumvention will proliferate if content-owners try too hard to dictate usage-terms.

Smells Like Grift

A few weeks ago, I got a letter congratulating me on qualifying for a stimulus check. The letter further stated that if I'd filed electronically, I'd get the funds direct deposited. Since I'm still fully employed and wasn't in need of the stimulus, I didn't think much about it till last week. None of my bank accounts seemed to be surplused by the amount specified in the letter. So, I did a quick search of my accounts and found no deposits in any of them - even having checked as far back as the first of the month prior to the letter.

So, I hit the IRS check-tracking site. After entering my info, it told me an electronic payment shoould have shown up during the second half of May and to doublecheck with my bank before filing a trace-request. I double-checked and, as before, no evidence of a deposit from the IRS.

I returned to the IRS site to see what I should do. I found the steps for filing a trace. The site told me to call an 800 number. I called the 800 number where, after holding for half an hour, the person that answered my call told me that the staff answering that number don't actually have the power to initiate a trace. I instead had to call a different number – a non toll-free number. Of course, this made me wonder "why the fuck is the IRS.Gov website saying to call the 800 number rather than the number I had to get from that 800 number after the long hold??"

At any rate, I called the number. SEVERAL TIMES. Each of the first few times, the number rang, I got a message saying the call was being transferred, heard what sounded like touch-tone numbers being auto-punched ...and then dead silence. Not a summary hangup, simply dead silence. I tried a half dozen or so times, last week, each time the same as the first. With my last failure, Friday, I decided, "I'll try once more on Monday morning. If that fails, I'll re-try the 800 number and see if there's a different number to call."

This morning, instead of getting the rerouting message, I got a "estimated hold time is 30-60 minutes" message and placed in a hold-queue with not entirely insanity-inducing hold-music. At the 62-minute mark, I got a message saying the call was being transferred to a representative ...followed by what sounded like touch-tone numbers being auto-punched ...and then dead silence.

Vexed, I called the original 800 number back. Waited 15 minutes for a human to pick up. I explained why I was calling a number I knew didn't have the power to help me track my payment (and that the website said it WAS the number I needed to call). The agent told me he'd try to transfer me to the group that did have the power to do the tracing. I heard a few clicks and got transferred to a hold-queue. A hold-queue that started by telling me the current hold time was in excess of 60 minutes ...followed by the same hold music I'd already listened to for 62 minutes, today.

I set my phone to speaker mode and continued about my day's work. At about the 95 minute mark, a message saying I was being transferred, followed by what sounded like touch-tone numbers being auto-punched. This time, however, I actually got a human. She asked me for my info. She then did a quick search and tells me, "you were sent a debit card". I was a skosh incredulous given that the IRS.Gov site had said I should have received a direct deposit  – I stated as much to her, further informing her that I've been electronically filing my taxes for well more than a decade and that, prior to Trump's tax "cut" receiving my refunds via direct deposit (since the "cut", I've been electronically paying my taxes from the same accounts that the refunds were direct-deposited to). She told me to wait while she re-verified. A few seconds passed and she verified that I would have been mailed a debit card.

She then told me that the letter would have looked like junk-mail. In my head, I silently railed, "who the fuck thought it was a good idea to make these things look like junk-mail???". She also informed me that I would have to contact the card-issuer to get a new card issued. Apparently, the IRS distributed the fund by way of a commercial provider.

So, yeah, $560Bn+ was given to a corporation to distrubute. A corporation that, no doubt, is both getting a contracted-rate for administering the distribution of funds and I imagine they were given a lump-sum to distribute and are getting investment income from every dollar that they can hold onto before recipients use the last few cents of the debit card. Similarly, if a card gets "lost in the mail", then "replacement fees may apply".

And, I get that they're trying to get people to spend the money rather than throw it into savings. But forcing me to take the funds by way of  a debit card when I (fortunately) don't have any urgent expenses is just dicktacular. The whole thing smells like it was architected to line the pockets of the stimulus-distributor – probably a Trump cronie – rather than get useful money into people's hands.

Further, as someone not exactly currently in a position of need, sending me a payment now, rather than if/when I might actually need it just seems really piss-poor. These one-time, lump-sum things rather than a proper social safety-net programs don't really encourage people to spend: knowing that you'll still have money (for food and shelter) tomorrow is a better way to ensure that people will spend today (in a way that keeps the economy humming).

Then What the Fuck Was It???

Became symptomatic three Thursdays ago (19th). Lasted into the first weekend. Hadn't wanted to be a hyphochondriac or one of the people overwhelming the system. So, I avoided looking up symptoms to try to avoid psyching myself into any I wasn't already displaying. Sat on the increasing illness until that first Sunday night, then went to the CDC website and did the health survey-bot thing. It said, "call your GP about testing".

Called first thing that Monday (23rd). Their lines were, naturally, busy. I selected the "call me back" option. Day passed by with no callback. Since GP's office was due to close at 1700, I called at 1600 to find out, "yo: should I have maybe been called back by now". Got hold of one of the office staff. They said there was no record of my morning call, so, no, I wasn't on the scheduled to be called back. Naturally, I'm thinking, "damned good thing I don't really 'trust the system'." At any rate, she said the my GP was tied up, at the moment, but that she'd put me on the immediate call-back list.

GP called back about 20 minutes later. He ran me through my symptoms and reviewed my health-history chart. He agreed that my symptoms and their progression – combined with my overall health history (immunocompromised due to my arthritis medications) – would normally warrant getting the test. However, he wasn't going to prescribe one at that time. He reasoned that, because the tests take 7+ days to come back and was already four days into my symptoms, I'd presumably either be recovering or in an ER (where I'd get higher-priority testing as a result) by the time results came back. That said, he told me that if, at any point, my fever went over 101, to call immediately for a reassessment.

Couple days later, symptoms started to abate. But, a day and a half later, they returned and were worse.

Having, by that time read up on things, one of the things I'd read was that a lull followed by a return and worsening of symptoms was also a normal progress-path for COVID-19. The really unfun note about that particular progress-path was that it was the more-common one for the 20% of people that end up needing hospitalization. Dandy.

Saturday night, my temperature hit 101.7. Having hit the proverbial red line, I called the GP's after-hours number. The rotation-GP told me to switch from regular cold meds in favor of taking 1000mg/8h (3000mg/dy) of acetaminophen-only. She also prescribed me the test and instructed me to get the first appointment I could the immediately-following Monday (30th).

A few hours after taking the first 1000mg dose, my fever started to come down a skosh. The first 24 hours, it hovered in the 100.0s depending on where in the dosing sweet-spot I was. Tried to level things out a bit by switching from the 8-hour dosing of 1000mg to 4-hour dosings of 500mg. Flattened the peaks and valleys a bit by doing so.

Given that my arthritis meds already cause liver-sensitivity, I decided to follow-up with my GP a couple days later (Wednesday, Apr 1). Wanted to ask about reducing the daily intake. I wasn't relishing the thought of saving my lungs but killing my liver. GP informed me that they had patiets in clinical liver failure that tolerated over 2000mg/dy for extended periods. However, he agreed that it was probably better for me to do the "half as much twice as frequently" thing I'd already started doing and, if symptoms allowed, try to go to 500mg every 5-6 hours instead.

My symptoms were moderately controlled under that regimen between Monday and the Wednesday I'd called my GP back about dosing. Unforutnately, the night after talking to my GP, (Thursday, April 2nd) when temperature increased its upward trend to just shy of 103 even on 500mg/4h and was starting to experience right-lung constriction and pain to go along with increased violence of the hacking cough.

I thought I might have to call the ER to let them know to prepare for a possible COVID19 arrival ("possible" since results still weren't due till today). Didn't tell my wife about the ER thoughts or the lung pain and constriction because she was already freaked out by the progression of things and tends not to be proverbial "rock" when things start looking like they're at risk of going sideways.
 
At any rate, since whatever I have consistently been hitting its temperature-peaks around midnight and this spike happened around midnight (ironically, was a day or two after this spike that I read an article that said nighttime temperature-spikes were also normal for COVID-19), I decided I'd try going to sleep and see if things were less awful in the morning. Took a double-dose of Tylenol PM in hopes it would both knock me out and curb the temperature and coughing-spike. Woke up 7 hours later with my temperature back down in the mid 99.0s.

Friday wasn't much better (evening temperature continued to hover in the high 100.0s to mid 101.0s, lots of coughing, right lung not feeling quite up to par, diziness etc.), but it also wasn't worse. Since it wasn't worse, I opted to continue to defer care-escalation.

Saturday and Sunday things were starting to head in the right direction: I was able to keep my temperature in the high-to-mid 99.0s most of each day on 500mg dosings (4-5 hours Saturday; 6-8 hours on Sunday). Though, each time the thermometer did the "fever" urgent-beep, Donna would come running into the room to ask what the temperature was.

Hospital lab actually called me on a Sunday night (21:12 according to my phone logs) to let me know the results came back negative. I asked the dude, "then WTF do I have that's causing these symptoms on this trajectory and for this long??" Even my GP had said he expected the results to come back positive. He feebly replied "you'll have to talk to your GP." All I could think was "thanks, dude: real helpful."

As I'm want to do, especially when things don't seem to be adding up, I did some further reading on the virus and associated testing methodologies. Found out that, while the RT-PCR test pretty much never provides a false-positive, it had a better than 30% false-negative rate in China and elsewhere and appeared to be doing so at higher rates in the US. Further, one article I found hinted that initial testing-efficacy reviews (though they took care to note that their review of the two English-language studies they'd reviewed – others were in Chinese and they had't had a chance to translate, yet – had yet to be peer-reviewed) seemed to indicate that the oral test might be more prone to false-negatives than the nasal-test. The test I received was the oral test.

Further complicating things is that I had oral surgery in 1998. That surgery left me with a grossly-abnormal throat and posterior-sinus configuration (due to no longer having tonsils, uvula nor much of my soft palate). So, "who fucking knows".

Overall, I'm wondering if we'll ever find out what the accuracy-rates of early(ish) RT-PCR testing proves to be. I'm especially curious about the US and even collection-facility-by-collection-facility differences. Also curious if/when they might take to doing the test as a two-test battery across some period of days, especially given that China's results showed not-infrequent negative-then-positive testing-results both on asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers.

The Other Shoe's Dropping

So, the place we take our doggos to for primary veterinary care announced on FaceBook:

Dear Clients,

After serving the community for over thirty-one (31) years, our emergency service will be closing the doors on February 24th, 2020. Despite all of our efforts, we have been unable to hire able and willing veterinarians to work the difficult overnight hours.

Our doors will remain open for urgent care needs during our general practice hours.

We hope to expand our general practice hours during the weekdays and on Saturdays and Sundays to provide you with more opportunities to for appointments and urgent care.

There are quite a few area hospitals that offer overnight emergency care and below some are listed:

• VCA Southpaws, Springfield, VA
• VCA Woodbridge, Woodbridge, VA
• Regional Veterinary Referral Center, Springfield, VA
• Colombia Pike Animal Hospital,
• The Hope Center, Vienna, VA
• Friendship Animal Hospital, Washington, DC

Sincerely,
VCA Alexandria Animal Hospital Veterinarians and staff.

I'll repeat that: they announced this via facebook rather than doing their customers the favor of directly mailing or emailing them, first.

When we first started to go to Alexandria Animal Hospital (now VCA Alexandria), it was a great place. To go: convenient, reasonable (for the area) prices, quick to get appointments, attentive service and had 24 hour emergency services and care. After they got acquired, the prices started to spiral while the service suffered. I'm guessing that those price increases weren't going to staff, especially since they're saying they can't get staff for the after-hours work (maybe if you paid people rather than lining stockholders pockets, you'd be able to get after-hours help?)

Now, after our one dog was diagnosed with cancer, last summer, and we ended up taking her to RVRC's oncology practice. We discovered that we really liked the staff there. However, RVRC's not a general-practice facility. But, the level of care we got reminded us, "there are still independent practices that focus on great care and service," so we asked if they knew any general-practice vets near us that had the type of care that Alexandria Animal Hospital had lost in the years following their acquisition by VCA. They gave us a list, but I kind of sat on it. In the back of my mind was, "do I want to change practices when VCA Alexandria is where I'll need to go for emergency services, any way." Well, that FaceBook post changes the equation.

To all these corporations buying out veterinary practices: "fuck you". You don't provide the level of care that brought in the customer bases you bought. You don't provide the level of service. And you're fucking price-gougers (which, if I thought was going to your staff rather than investors, I wouldn't mind). I hope VCA, Banfield, etc. all fucking die in a fire.

Me? I guess I'll need to find a new, independent practice before this year's annual checkups are due.

This Is Why We Hate You

UHC is a righteous pain in the dick:

UHC, like more and more health insurance companies, has their own, mail-order pharmacy service. In the yearly open enrollment, we're issued a warning about coverage of maintenance-medications: "UHC may choose not to cover maintenance-medications that are not procured through their mail-order service". Like a good little boy, at my last yearly checkup, I had my doctor write all my scripts as one-year, mail-order scripts so I could have UHC's mail-order service take care of them. That was January of 2019.

Fast-forward to yesterday. I get an email from the prescription mail-order service telling me that my next order is being cancelled: my script had expired and they couldn't contact the prescriber to get my script extended.

Couple things, here: 1) my current script, written in the second half of January 2019, is actually good through February of 2020; 2) my doctor will write early script, but charges a fee to do so; 3) because my insurer's pharmacy won't pay that fee, the doctor won't extend my prescription; 4) all of this is only a problem because there's a 1-2 month gap between when my on-file script ends and the period that my insurer's pharmacy is filling for.

So, now, I'm probably going to have to pay a non-office prescribing fee because my UHC's in house pharmacy is full of idiots (causing a 12-month set of prescriptions to effectively be a 9-month set of prescriptions) ...meaning I potentially end up with a medication gap for epilepsy medications as well as leaving me on the hook for to cover an early prescribing fee.

UHC: This is why people hate you and the rest of your cabal.

Diminishing Returns

Seems like, every time a zero-year birthday is imminent, I go into sort of a funk. And, with each looming zero-year birthday, the time between the actual birthday and the onset of that funk increases. I was a late-term baby: maybe I was late to my very first zero-year birthday because I didn't want to face it and was sulking in my mom's womb? Dunno.

Weird thing for me is that I don't really have a sense of time. My memory makes it so that pretty much everything that's happened seems "recent". The only real way that I have any time-sense is that I'm able to recognize that my memories have order and I know that a longer line of memory-dominoes indicates that something happened further in the past ...but that's about the only semi-tangible clue about the scale of the amount of time that's past. Yet, as nebulous an indicator as that clue is, it still seems to be enough to cause the whole "looming zero-year funk" to start earlier and earlier.

That this past Thanksgiving marked the tenth without my father probably didn't help. Similarly, not being able to have Thanksgiving with my mom due to illness probably exacerbated things. Thus, this time's zero-year dread seems to have started a full two months before my actual birthday. It probably started even before that – though less in the form of dread than small things like starting to answer people's "how old are you" question with, "nearly fifty" ...at least as far back as May.

The universe also seems to be prompting it. For starters, this summer, a month before she was to turn nine, by doggo was diagnosed with cancer. While it seems like like the surgery, recovery and three months of chemo successfully prosecuted the cancer, the event/process still turned my mind to aging and death. Then came the Thanksgiving-time reminder of things. And, as a coda to that, one of the streaming TV services decided that November would be a great time to run a Marathon of Dead Like Me. Don't get me wrong: it's a great series – even if it's been 15 years since I've watched it – but its timing was especially resonant this year.

As fun as going to EDM shows and festivals tends to be, it probably doesn't help the "I feel old thing". Not so much the aching joints an muscles the next day as being surrounded by people that are literally less than half my age (started this birth-year by going to see Herobust at Echostage, for my birthday, where I ran into another guy celebrating his birthday ...but it was his 24th). And, while I'm not the oldest person at festivals I'm usually the oldest at one-night events (including performers, staff and probably even the ownership). And, while the twenty- and thirty-somethings we run into are usually very welcoming and like to point to my wife and me and say "life goals", it's still a compliment that drives home the gulf in ages.

Plus, this zero-year, I'm almost certainly in that part of ones life where there's more years behind than ahead. The only way that's not true is if I manage to top the century-mark. And, while family-longevity says that's a possibility I've enough in the way of chronic health conditions – and semi-toxic treatments for same – that even if I otherwise could reasonably expect to top the century-mark, those conditions and their treatment means the safe money is on not topping it.

Oh well...

Ruminations

I dunno whether it's that had to spend Thanksgiving not with family. 
 
I dunno whether it's the fact that it's just after the tenth anniversary of my dad's death. 
 
I dunno whether it's the realization that I'm on my a bit more than twelve years younger than when my dad died. 
 
I dunno whether it's that my 50th birthday Loom's less than two months away. 
 
All I really know is that death, dying and whether or what might come after has been filtering through my mind a lot lately.

Why I Don't Respect Our Corporate Security or Training Teams

So, I get to work today, and find an email from the computer-based training system saying that I'm nearly a month past due on some of my annual training-requirements. This struck me odd, because I generally make sure to knock out training either the day it's due or the last day I know I'll be in the office immediately before it's due.

I login to the portal to look at the training schedule. I find the "overdue" training. I look in my home directory's training certificates folder and notice that there's a matching ID in there from the second half of January of this year ...meaning that its renewal _should_ have been due in the second half of this coming January.

Go back to the training portal and see, "oh: this is a new revision of the training ...released a few days ago, but with an author-date of a few weeks ago. I guess this update obsoleted my existing training. And it looks like the 'overdue' notice was sent out on the day that the training was mad available on the training-portal but back-dated to the day it was authored." All of which is great because our managers get "overdue reports" about each of our training and anything beyond one week overdue is considered unacceptable and might result in our accesses being revoked. So, uh, yeah.
At any rate, I open the new training in my browser ...and quickly discover I have to use a different browser because the _brand new training_ is delivered via Flash and my day-to-day browser disables flash for security reasons. Irony: the training is security training.

As usual, at the end of the training is a "knowledge check" quiz. As I go through the quiz, there's a few questions whose multiple-choice answers are either "not quite right", have answers whose correctness varies on how you read the question (and the question's wording is awkward/muddy/etc.) ...or straight up wrong.

I answer the questions – including choosing "next best" answer on one where the one that turned out to be the "correct" answer _rhymed_ with what's correct but was, itself, _not_ correct (unless my ability to rent a car is an example of a best practice around providing minimized privilege set: apparently, whoever wrote the quiz and whoever did an editorial reading of the test thought "lease privilege" is a real thing in the context of IT security best practices). I hit the done/score button and fail the quiz ...by exactly the number of poorly-written/incorrect questions/answers.
Fortunately, there's a re-try button. So, I go back and provide the right incorrect answers and get a passing grade.

After printing out and saving the certificate of completion, I'm presented with a survey link. "Great," I think to myself, "I'm going to fucking roast them." I was, at minimum, planning to leave a one-word comment, "theiy're," in any available free-form response section. Naturally, the link to the survey doesn't actually work.

WTF.

Taking the Long View

In general, I'm not one of those "shiny, happy people". English is only my second language: sarcasm is my first. I'm generally a contrarian ...but I'm consistent with it: not only do I find the clouds to other people's silver-linings, I'll find the silver linings to other people's clouds.

Recently, one of my dogs was afflicted with abdominal cancer. Originally, her primary veterinary-practice vet presumed insulinoma. Subsequent imaging – first a sonogram then a computerized axial tomography (I'd use the more common "CAT" but seems odd to do so in the context of a dog) scan – combined with a non-indicative test-result for overabundance of insulin seemed to indicate that it was probably a liver tumor. Today, she had surgery …and the tumor turned out not to be associated with her liver at all: was a tumor growing off her stomach that had butted up so snug against her liver that the imaging made it look like a liver tumor. Have to wait for histology results to come back to find out just what kind of beastie it is.

At any rate, the afflicted dog was the fourth rescue we adopted ...and the third to be afflicted with cancer. The first two were euthanized because of their (untreatable) cancers. The third dog died of sudden renal failure. In short, I've plenty to be "cloudy" about – particularly when it comes to my pup-luck.

That said, all five of the dogs we've adopted have been absolutely wonderful companions. So, my pup-luck isn't completely shitty. And, taking the long view of things, I've actually got plenty to be thankful for:

• I've been employed at a sufficient-enough pay-scale that I've been able to save aggressively not only for retirement but for "rainy days".
• Due to the previous point, my care-decisions for the current dog's treatment have, thus far, only needed to be driven by probable outcomes rather than financial considerations.
• I have a wonderful set of friends and acquaintances who've been wishing us well with our current canine-health straits
• I live someplace where I have access to a number of both day-to-day and specialty veterinary practitioners
• I live close to said practitioners
• Those practitioners have flexible enough schedules that:
  • I was able to have my dog be seen by an emergency veterinarian within an hour of the episode that ultimately uncovered the tumor
  • Prior to the oncology-referral, the emergency vet asked to do some additional diagnostics that could have included ICU charges, but for which I was only charged the actual lab fees.
  • I was able to have very frank discussions with the emergency vet about likely diagnoses and prognostics
  • I was able to have my dog be seen by a veterinary oncologist within a day of the emergency vet's lab results coming back.
  • I was able to have a CT scan performed the first business day after the oncology consult.
  • I was able to have very frank discussions with the oncology vets about likely diagnoses and prognostics resultant of all the preceding diagnostics
  • I was able to have a surgical-consult the day after the final imaging results came back
  • I was able to have surgery performed the same day as the consult.
• I have a very understanding employer who's been able to accommodate me suddenly needing to take time away from the office so I could take advantage of all of the above scheduling flexibility
• I have an employer who's trying to work within their legal frameworks to help me with the financial aspects of things
• As noted previously, I have enough in the way of savings that I don't need my employer to come up with a financial hail-mary for me.
• Because of my financial standing, even if I didn't have the liquid or semi-liquid savings as an immediate backstop, I could probably fairly trivially pick up a 0/0 credit card to help me bridge any savings-gaps I might have had.

Now, to hope that:

• The pathology report comes back with results that allow me to be thankful to have my doggo for another few years.
• All of the dog-related concerns can ebb soon enough that (what appear to be) incipient health-problems for my wife can be addressed free of worry about doggo. Basically, if wife does end up hospitalized, again (fuck you, Chron's), hopefully doggo will be sufficiently on the mend that I'll be able to visit wife during her hospitalization.

Lastly, as crap as 2019 has been from a medical and veterinary standpoint, there've been enough other positives – both those listed above and those that I've not explicitly stated – that I can easily see that things could be so much worse. And, no, I'm not asking the Universe for a demonstration of how much worse things could be. I would prefer to be able to remain thankful for the luck-detour being manageable.

Stating the Blindingly-Obvious

I was gonna title this "cancer sucks", but changed my mind for two reasons:

1. This is may not be the only post in the coming weeks/months that would want that title.
2. It's a statement of the blindingly-obvious (and, thusly, not terribly original)

Vet contacted me, today, about Lady. The initial test-results were not confirmative of insulinoma. He said this wasn't surprising because, while her blood sugar levels were quite low, they weren't in the range typically necessary for a blood-draw to be definitive for insulinoma. Worse, just because the sonogram showed a obvious, consolidated tumor in her liver, that no tumors were visible in her pancreas isn't definitive of primary hepatic cancer. It's notionally possible that she could have pancreatic tumors that are too small to see on sonogram - even if they were the primary source of the cancer in her liver. It's a concern because primary hepatic cancer is rare in dogs. So, while she could be lucky - inasmuch as having life-threatening cancer in the liver can be - and have primary cancer of the liver, the odds are against that.

This left me with a couple options:

• Do the oncology consult (scheduled for the morning of July 15th) without doing more to eliminate the likelihood of insulinoma
• Drop her off at the vet, tomorrow, for some additional testing

Since it would be horrible to subject her to liver surgery if one could know that it was both unnecessary and make her spend her remaining weeks recovering from major abdominal surgery, I'm opting for the additional testing. Unfortunately, those tests can still produce a non-definitive diagnosis: like many tests, they're ok for confirming a positive diagnosis (that she has insulinoma) but not for confirming a negative diagnosis (that she absolutely doesn't have insulinoma). For potential longevity sake, I obviously hope for lack of a positive diagnosis from the tests. 

Unfortunately, the tests aren't without risk. They have to fast her to see if her blood sugar drops enough to get a definitive positive test result. Fasting her to that point puts her at risk for seizures and worse. Primary thing going for her is that she'll notionally be being closely-enough observed during the fasting that (if she does have insulinoma) that she would be caught low enough to test yet not so low that she suffers neurological impairment (that would necessitate an even earlier departure than pancreatic cancer, by itself, would have caused).

Still even if the fasting-blood-tests don't prove confirmative of pancreatic cancer, proceeding with surgery isn't a slam-dunk. They could open her up, do the liver resection, send off the excised tissue for biopsy and still find that it wasn't primary hepatic cancer. Meaning, that I potentially put her through abdominal surgery for nothing and put her in pain for a non-trivial chunk of her remaining time with us.

I imagine, if tomorrow's tests are non-confirmative, one of the things that we'll discuss at the oncology consultation is further pre-surgical testing. And whether they could be conducted as part of a larger, contingent procedure. That might be something like, "do an MRI (or something) and, if that comes back clean, only then move on to the resection."

Problem is, dogs, unlike humans, can't really be given an MRI without general anaesthetic. That means either doing one, long sedation for the MRI and then surgery (if the MRI were clean). The longer anything is under general anaesthetic, the riskier things become. Notionally, could do separate procedures, but that has its own risks: 1) two applications of anaesthetic in a short period of time is risky; 2) liver cancer is aggressive enough that the delay between discreet procedures likely results in the growth of the existing tumor and/or possibly allow time for it to metastasize even if it has yet to do so. And, risks to Lady aside, there's also the financial impact: doing the additional testing also markedly increases the costs of an already expensive procedure.

My primary concern is that I do the most good for the least amount of harm. And, if I can't do her any good, I'd like to at least not do her any further harm than whatever bomb ticking in her abdomen is want to do.

There's just not a lot of good choices, here. 

Unwanted Curveballs

To open, I'm not going to say anything like "God is a bastard". I'm, at best, agnostic. Which is to say, while I suspect that the life we have is all there is and that there's no father-like figure out there overseeing my existence, I don't have what I'd consider sufficient proof to make the leap to full-on atheism. Atheism requires a degree of certitude I don't possess. Not really sure how anyone has that much. …But I digress: it's the long-winded way of saying "I don't think there's anyone to call a bastard" and I doubt that, if there is, I don't think he's out there trying to make my life hard. If there's a God, he's got far bigger fish to fry than singling me out for torment. And, really, my torment is small potatoes compared to millions – maybe billions – of others'.

What I do know is that, no matter how Right™ you try to live, no matter how hard you try to properly see to those in your care, no matter how much control you try to exert on existence, it doesn't seem to matter. Sometimes, it feels like the more you try, the more it blows back on you.

I'm one of those people that ascribes to the whole "live within your means" thing and "save for a rainy day" and "save for retirement" ethos. For the most part, I've been able to meet those aspirations. That said, watching how others live frequently makes me feel like people who don't are often rewarded for flauting the fable of the ant and the grasshopper …or, at least, aren't as penalized for spendthrift behavior in a way that's adequately proportionate (which can feel the same as being rewarded).

At any rate, while I don't lack for things I truly need – and it viscerally rankles me when people ascribe the term "need" to things that are, at best, "wants" – and I do indulge in occasional luxuries or self-pampering, I don't do so with the frequency that it seems many people I know do. I shepherd my money.

What I do tend to spend on are things like healthy diet for myself, my wife and my pets. Similarly, I spend for regular/prophylactic medical care for myself , my wife and my pets. Unfortunately, there's years like this one – and felt most acutely on days like today – where it all feels like wasted effort. It's like tilting at windmills. My autoimmune arthritis continues to progress – if more slowly than it otherwise might. My wife's been in the middle of a months-long Chron's flare that looks to have her on a trajectory to another hospitalization. And today?

Today I found out that my dog (we have two – one that's notionally my wife's and one that's notionally mine), Lady, has a large tumor in her liver. I found this out because, as I was working from home, writing automation for a customer's cloud environment, Lady started an episode of repeated pancaking.

In the span of a little less than 30 minutes (from a hair before 11:00 to around 11:25 or so), she was falling flat for no apparent reason. First, I'd seen her get up from her one pillow to go get a drink. On the way, I saw her pancake out of the corner of my eye. It didn't look normal, but, I told myself, "maybe she just stumbled and it looked wrong because you saw it from the corner of your eye. Best to keep an eye on her." Self-delusion is grand. Unfortunately, as I feared, it wasn't normal. After getting her drink and starting to walk back from the dish, she shuddered, briefly, then pancaked again. She got right back up, though, so I didn't immediately panic. But then she went to go lay with our other dog, and pancaked again while taking a step up onto the main stairs. At this point, the sinking feeling really set in: barely controlled panic. I SMSed my wife to tell her to hurry home with the car before calling the vet to arrange an emergency visit.  Between the SMS and call to the vet, Lady pancaked one more time before I brought her up on the couch. She had a worried look and I wanted to be able to soothe her. Donna eventually got home and sat on the arm of the couch next to Lady. Lady sat up to say hello ...then toppled back over against me.

Wife home, I went upstairs to get dressed so we could gather up the dog and head to the vet. The on-couch toppling was the last such event before heading to the vet.

We were able to run Lady and Kaiya (our other dog) outside to go to the bathroom without further pancaking from Lady. We were able to get them leashed and harnessed up for the trip (they actually had a scheduled appointment for booster shots, this afternoon) with no pancaking. Lady strode enthusiastically out to the car and hopped up into the back seat without any sign of lack of sure-footedness. Similarly, when we got to the vet, she hopped right down out of the car and did her boxery walk into the vet's office – all with no sign of problems.

The vet-tech took care of Kaiya's booster shot while we waited with Lady for the vet. Kaiya was in an irritable mood – she tends to be leash-reactive, especially at the vet's – so I had Donna run her home while I stayed with Lady. The office staff took us to a room to wait for an available vet.

Eventually he came into the examining room. We discussed what had prompted the change in plans for the day. He decided that some initial diagnostics were in order, but that it would take an hour or so to do them. So he offered the opportunity for us to leave rather than wait in the veterinary facility. Given that the pancaking happened a skosh before lunchtime and it was now 12:45 (and some of my panic had either semi-subsided or I'd been able to compartment it off), I was beginning to feel hangry. So, we took the opportunity to go home so I could get lunch.

Vet called a hair before 15:00 to come talk about Lady. We rushed back down. He indicated that there were some troubling indications in her initial bloodwork. Specifically, here blood sugar levels were critically low – and they'd tested twice to verify that there wasn't a labwork error. That had caused him to do some preliminary imaging. He indicated he wasn't an imaging specialist, but that it had looked like there might be a mass near her liver.

We discussed what this could mean – especially combined with the pancaking and blood sugar levels – and appropriate next steps. We opted to have their sonographer do a more-detailed imaging and analysis. This would take about an hour. Eventually, the results came back: a large, consolidated mass in her liver.

Obviously, my heart sunk through the floor and my voice wanted to betray me. But, I gritted through discussing prognosis and next steps. Because the mass seems to be consolidate/confined, he recommended an oncology consult and offered a referral. There's a chance that, given early enough surgery and that the tumor is as confined as it looks, she could potentially recover in a way where she'd have decent quality of life and not suffer from a premature-for-her-breed death ...but that the oncologist would likely be able to give a better idea.

We started talking numbers, both for today's vet visit, plus likely fees for consult, surgery, etc. Nice thing about numbers is it gives me something non-emotional to focus on. I was doing a running-tally of the current and projected numbers in my head versus how much I knew to be in our "rainy day"/vacation fund. The numbers were close but notionally wouldn't require making a life/death decision based solely on financial capability, and might not even require having to resort to credit cards or tapping into the investment-account (or, as I sometimes refer to it, "the really rainy-day account"). We agreed to a plan of action: he'd provide an oncology referral and steroids to help encourage her liver to release more sugar into her blood; we'd alter her diet to reduce simple carbs  and increase protein and fibre intake (irony is that, with a hypoglycemia-inducing liver tumor, the diet change isn't "give her more sweets" but "feed her like she has diabetes") while simultaneously changing from twice-a-day feeding to an every-four-hours schedule (though same basic daily caloric intake) to help smooth out the glycemic peaks-and-valleys; we'd schedule an appointment with a canine oncologist and proceed based on the outcome of that meeting.

Given that we didn't get home till after 17:30 and tomorrow being a national holiday, won't even be able to call to schedule the consult till Friday. I've asked for multiple referrals so that I can take her to whoever's able to see her first. Fortunately, there's enough in the "rainy day"/vacation fund that I'm able to accommodate a "speed trump costs" strategy. In the face of (personal) tragedy, it's always good to look for things to be thankful for where you can find them.

Obviously, as of this writing, haven't had the oncology consult: everything could turn out to be moot.

Regardless of this particular incident, this will make three dogs to have been afflicted with cancer:

• Our first rescue-bullie, Lana, contracted a treatable cancer, but, it was discovered coincident to discovering she had advanced stenosis. Given her age, the stenosis and the toll treatment would take on her absent those other considerations, we opted to schedule a euthanization (so we could take her home for a few weeks of pampering).
• A month later, our second rescue-bullie, Puckett, had manifested skin lesions. A vet visit revealed them to be from cutaneous lymphoma: an aggressive, untreatable (in dogs, at least) form of cancer. Vet predicted a possible remaining lifespan of six months. We got half that when the cancer spread to his lungs.
• With Lady, our fourth rescue-bullie, I don't yet know the outcome. I suspect the worst, however. That seems to be the way of things.

By a small miracle (at least, it seems that way, at this point) our third rescue-bullie, Cira, was not afflicted with cancer. No... At just shy of nine years old (a skosh longer than six years after joining our household), she died of a sudden-onset, complete renal failure.

So, yeah, our pup-luck has been "not great". I mean, to date, we've been blessed with five really wonderful dogs, but three – and likely a fourth – we'll have only been able to share our home with for far shorter times than is normal for their main breeds' life-expectancies. And that's in spite of the previously mentioned attentive care.

In short, dog-owning life has had a way of really making us feel like the Universe is, at best, indifferent, many times cruelly-so.

News flash: Virginia is an "Old South" state.

It's nickname is "Old Dominion" for a reason. Several of its most famous historical figures owned slaves and led Confederate forces. Hell, it was the seat of the Confederacy for a while.

I've lived here for a quarter century, now. "Northern Virginia" was a near pejorative for "real" Virginians when I first moved here.

I still remember how stark the difference between the 703 area code was from the rest of the state. It defined not just your dialing rates/locality but a noticable mind-set difference. Just beyond the 703, where you now find tech companies and  huge tractsA-friendly neighborhoods McMansions, you used to see farms and rustic stores Hawking souvenirs from "the War of Northern Aggression".

My point is, discovering that a politician that was born, raised and attended college in "Old South" Virginia before the 90s ever participated in black-face is utterly unsurprising. Not excusing it. Just pointing out some unfortunate reality. There's likely a lot of skeletons in the closets of a significant chunk of the Virginia state government's office-holders. It's likely to be another 15-20 years before that's no longer the case.

It's not just a Virginia thing, either. Hell, it's not even just a "South" problem. I grew up in what, as an adult, I refer to as Pennsyltucky. The vast majority of the state is/was rural ...and its main cities were never (on average) something you'd have confused for "cosmopolitan", "sophisticated" or particularly "progressive". I knew plenty of people my age that, even 20 years ago, would say things that might leave you gawping or scratching your head and wondering, "did you really just say that?" And if you were talking people a generation or two older than me? Fuuuuuck. I loved my grandmother dearly, but I don't have enough fingers to count the number of times she would use "the coloreds" or similar terminology in her speech. It wasn't meant in a particularly-racist way - it was normal for her generation and class - but would still leave me sometimes speechless.

I used to travel extensively, for work. I can tell you that Pennsylvania is not alone in this respect among Northern states.

So, yeah, the current news cycle about what's going on in Richmond is pretty fucking gross. However, as alluded to above, given the current composition of the elected body, summarily cashiering people who've had skeletons might not be the smartest thing. The replacements could easily be worse people. It's even likely that the people that dug those skeletons up have the same damned skeletons (that they think are burried a bit better than those of the recently-exposed) but also have something to gain by digging others' up.

I dunno. It sucks. Doesn't feel like there's a lot of good options inside the next decade or so. That said, I'd still probably prefer someone that claims repentance over someone still wearing a MAGA hat.

Going Nowhere

It's funny, I've spent a decent chunk of my working-life traveling:

• 22 straight months for SGI
• 6 straight months for NetApp
• sporadically for Digex/WorldComm/MCI
• 5 straight years for Wells Landers (on behalf of Veritas, Sun and VMware)

Given that the above accounts for all but the most-recent nine years of my career, that I have managed to completely duck traveling for both my current company or my prior company is kind of an aberration. That said, that desire to avoid traveling isn't without reason...

Having had to deal with the expensing systems for small items like tolls and similar costs for attending local event, certification exam costs and the like, I've felt compelled to avoid incurring any work-related expenses that I couldn't afford to not get reimbursed for. Worse, because said expenses are employee-fronted and their systems are/were such fucking disasters, there is/was the likelihood of incurring interest charges while waiting for the expense-processes to get worked out. I can cover a few $100s to pay off a credit card and avoid interest when the expensing-process is horribly broken and slow. Paying off airfare, hotel and meals for a week-long conference or training course (and the fees for attending the conference or course)? Not so much ...and I for damned sure ain't paying interest on that waiting for an expense check to get cut (or try to recover interest accrued due to said waiting).

So, over the last nine years, my travel has been limited to pleasure trips. Which is to say, travel that doesn't force me to have to deal with an expensing-nightmare. The only travel nightmares have been the horror-show that is the fucking TSA. With "TSA" accounting for why most of our vacations are "mini" vacations that are done either by car or train. Because of the TSA, a pleasure trip has to be really worth the hassle.